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Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation')
| -rw-r--r-- | Documentation/x86/mds.rst | 42 |
1 files changed, 42 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/x86/mds.rst b/Documentation/x86/mds.rst index 54d935bf283b..87ce8ac9f36e 100644 --- a/Documentation/x86/mds.rst +++ b/Documentation/x86/mds.rst @@ -149,3 +149,45 @@ Mitigation points This takes the paranoid exit path only when the INT1 breakpoint is in kernel space. #DB on a user space address takes the regular exit path, so no extra mitigation required. + + +2. C-State transition +^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ + + When a CPU goes idle and enters a C-State the CPU buffers need to be + cleared on affected CPUs when SMT is active. This addresses the + repartitioning of the store buffer when one of the Hyper-Threads enters + a C-State. + + When SMT is inactive, i.e. either the CPU does not support it or all + sibling threads are offline CPU buffer clearing is not required. + + The idle clearing is enabled on CPUs which are only affected by MSBDS + and not by any other MDS variant. The other MDS variants cannot be + protected against cross Hyper-Thread attacks because the Fill Buffer and + the Load Ports are shared. So on CPUs affected by other variants, the + idle clearing would be a window dressing exercise and is therefore not + activated. + + The invocation is controlled by the static key mds_idle_clear which is + switched depending on the chosen mitigation mode and the SMT state of + the system. + + The buffer clear is only invoked before entering the C-State to prevent + that stale data from the idling CPU from spilling to the Hyper-Thread + sibling after the store buffer got repartitioned and all entries are + available to the non idle sibling. + + When coming out of idle the store buffer is partitioned again so each + sibling has half of it available. The back from idle CPU could be then + speculatively exposed to contents of the sibling. The buffers are + flushed either on exit to user space or on VMENTER so malicious code + in user space or the guest cannot speculatively access them. + + The mitigation is hooked into all variants of halt()/mwait(), but does + not cover the legacy ACPI IO-Port mechanism because the ACPI idle driver + has been superseded by the intel_idle driver around 2010 and is + preferred on all affected CPUs which are expected to gain the MD_CLEAR + functionality in microcode. Aside of that the IO-Port mechanism is a + legacy interface which is only used on older systems which are either + not affected or do not receive microcode updates anymore. |